Forza Horizon 3 Review: Simplistic By Design

The Australian outback is your playground in Forza Horizon 3, and you have a bigger car collection than that of LeBron James at your disposal.

Developer: Playground Games

Publisher: Microsoft Studios

Platform: Xbox One (Version reviewed), Microsoft Windows

Release Date: September 27, 2016

I could start this review of Forza Horizon 3 with some existential drivel, or reminisce on the current standard of the modern racing video game. Or, in the spirit of Forza Horizon 3 itself, I could just delve straight into the action, throwing aside all excess baggage and actually getting down to what matters.

Because in the aforementioned matter of getting down to what actually matters, Forza Horizon 3 is a particularly intelligent video game. It recognises that you’re coming here for the racing, and not a lot more. To that end, the very first task that the game presents the player with is to race across slices of each individual area of the Australian setting, effectively giving the player a highlight reel of the entire map within the first five minutes of the game.

Perhaps doubting itself in the adrenaline-charged nature of its opening, Forza Horizon 3 then places the player in their very first race of the game. Your challenger? An army helicopter, casually giving a lift through the jungle race course to a dune buggy. This entire opening sequence is a fantastic example of how developer PlayGround Games has come to understand what players want from the Forza Horizon series.

While the game’s goals may feel like a checklist, the actual tasks on the list are where Forza Horizon 3 truly excels.

But once the opening sequence has been completed and the player is allowed to explore the Australian setting at their will, the road becomes decidedly more straightforward for Forza Horizon 3. Bombastic races like the helicopter opening are extremely scarce, with the game taking care only to implement these feats at certain stages. These stages only occur when the player opts to expand their “Forza festival” to a new location. For example, if one were to choose the desert location in which to set up shop, you’ll be presented with the opportunity to race a freight train through the scorching heat.

The Forza festivals themselves are particularly emblematic of the rudimentary progression system in Forza Horizon 3. The overarching goal of the entire game seems to be expanding your festivals, and to do this, you’ll need to perform in various races and physics-defying stunts to attract a certain amount of fans. This systematic progression effectively dumbs down the entire ‘campaign’ of Forza Horizon 3, rendering it little more than a massive checklist of tasks for the player to undertake.

However, while the game’s goals may feel like a checklist, the actual tasks on the list are where Forza Horizon 3 truly excels. These ‘tasks’, of course, are the races and stunts themselves, which can be found in various locations throughout the map area of the game, and are obviously the main draw of the game for any prospective players. As the game boasts well over 400 unique roads throughout the map, you can imagine how each individual race is incredibly varied, depending on the location in which it is set.

For example, races set in the city portion of the game will have a lot more twists and turns to them, as well as an increased amount of unfortunate civilians caught in the middle of these races (after over 20 races, I can’t quite work out how my entire driving syndicate still hasn’t been arrested). Races set in either the jungle or the desert will have a lot more straightforward roads, and Forza Horizon 3 expects you to pick your car accordingly, being admirably unforgiving to the player if they picked a car with bad handling for a race in the city.

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But what is a lot more forgiving in Forza Horizon 3 is the difficulty, or rather the lack thereof. The player is once again presented with the ‘rewind’ feature, which effectively allows you to entirely cancel out any mistakes through time travelling back to before the mistake itself was committed, whether this was simply going around a bend too quickly, or charging headfirst off the entire race track. While the feature allows practically any player, whether newbie or veteran, to dive straight into the game, it can easily be abused to give the player a flawless run of the circuit, as the feature is unbound by a limited usage.

If you were thinking that the game might penalise the player in the rewards they reap from races where there was excessive use of the rewind feature, you’d be incorrect. Forza Horizon 3‘s rewards come in the form of ‘CR’, of which a certain amount is gained after a race depending on where the player finished and how much wreckage they caused on the course. However, the CR is entirely unaffected by how much the rewind feature is used, meaning each race can be manipulated according to the desire of the player with virtually no punishment.

The CR itself is actually put to good use by the game. You can use it to both buy and upgrade your vehicles with an assortment of options from which to choose. In addition to this, you can fine tune the difficulty of individual races in order to gain more CR from them. For example, you can turn up the difficulty of the ‘Drivatar’ (why are we still using that word?) opponents in order to gain +15% to your CR earnings, or instead turn off brake assist to earn +20% CR from the individual race.

Outside of the actual races, the player is encouraged to undertake additional endeavours around the Australian environment. These can include ‘barn finds’, in which the player is relayed the rough location of a barn hiding a rare vehicle by Warren (the living caricature of an Australian). Although the area in which the barn is hidden is relatively manageable, there are always at least four other buildings that look identical to the actual barn you want to find, meaning you can easily spend the better part of ten minutes stumbling around in circles, encountering the same few buildings.

While you could put yourself through all this in order to gain a relatively rare car, you could instead opt to purchase a vehicle to add to your collection. Forza Horizon 3 has an impressive range for the player to choose from. There are various makes and models of vehicles, from your standard pickup truck or BMW, all the way to Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Aston Martins. If you, like me, can barely pick out a Porsche from a Mercedes, then rest assured, for Forza Horizon 3 never heaps unnecessary vehicle information on the player, allowing you to simply buy it and drive it.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.